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Launched with the stated
goal of wiping out Saddam Hussein's stores of weapons of mass
destruction, which were never found, the invasion of Iraq 10 years ago
continues to reverberate in an unstable region and beyond. Though the
war itself was relatively brief, its aftermath has often been violent
and bloody clearly evident from the wave of bombings in Baghdad
yesterday. Here's a look at perceptions of the war a decade later.

LONDON - The 10th
anniversary of the start of the Iraq war is not a landmark the US or its
close allies are eager to commemorate.

The war is now regarded
as a folly from which the US benefited least: As a common joke in the
Middle East has it, the Americans may have won the battles but the
Iranians won the subsequent peace and Turkey pocketed the economic
advantages.

Yet, that may be a bit
too harsh. Although it's unlikely that the Iraq war will ever be
considered one of America's glorious moments, future generations may
take a slightly more forgiving view.

Every narrative of the war invariably starts with the dark, brooding shadow of then US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who together with a small cabal of "Neo-Cons", allegedly spoiled for a fight.

But that's a travesty. The reality is that the war initially enjoyed overwhelming support in the US Congress
and 80 per cent of the American electorate. The few European nations
which had the temerity to oppose it were dismissed as limp-wristed:
French fries were famously renamed "liberty fries" in US canteens.

It is now fashionable to
claim that this popular support was hyped by a US government which lied
about Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction. The "had I
known then what I know now, I would not have voted for it" argument
subsequently became popular with many American lawmakers and especially
with Mrs Hillary Clinton, who spent years trying to prove that she was
really against a war for which she actually voted.

Yet, there was no
deliberate misinformation. The intelligence failure about Iraq's
supposed weapons of mass destruction had nothing to do with a desire to
hoodwink but more with the inability of any rational government analyst
to decipher Saddam Hussein's complicated game. The Iraqi leader secretly
destroyed his stocks of gas and chemical weapons, hoping that this
would deprive the West of a justification to attack, but still pretended
that he had the weapons in order to maintain his street-credibility in
the Arab world. In effect, this was a double-bluff which worked better
than Saddam himself intended.

Still, it should not be
forgotten that all intelligence agencies - including those of Germany
and France, which otherwise strenuously opposed military action - fell
for this double-bluff and concluded that the Iraqi leader did have
weapons of mass destruction. The war's supporters were not restricted to
some extreme US right-wingers.

It is now tragically easy
to make the case that the approximately 5,000 US and allied soldiers,
plus at least 126,000 Iraqi civilians, who perished in this war died
largely in vain. America's standing in the Middle East not only failed
to improve, but nosedived. The removal, capture and execution of Saddam
Hussein did nothing to promote democracy; the so-called Arab Spring came
almost five years later.

Most of Iraq's
considerable oil exports now go to China rather than to the nations
whose soldiers died in the war. Far from being an ally of the West,
Iraq's Shi'ite-dominated government is now an ally of Iran. And far from
being a bulwark against terrorism, Iraq is now one of the top breeding
grounds for men of violence.

Seldom has so much blood
and money - a staggering US$1.7trillion (S$2.1trillion) - been spent for
so little. Estimates of the war cost vary, with one study by Brown University saying the US would ultimately have to pay US$6 trillion including interest.

Still, the time may come
when a more nuanced perspective on this war will prevail. To start with,
it is a fundamental fallacy to assume that had the US not launched a
war a decade ago, the Middle East could have remained a peaceful place.
By 2003, the international sanctions against Saddam were disintegrating.
Without a war, the Iraqi ruler would have emerged as the Arab world's
most important leader.

And it is likely that, in
response to Iran's nuclear quest, he would have revived his own search
for nuclear weapons as well as seek to replenish his arsenal of other
weapons of mass destruction. The alternative to the Iraq war was never
peace: The choice was between an immediate crisis or a prolonged one in
which, perhaps, just as many Arabs would have perished.

Precisely because of
this, many ordinary Iraqis still hail the war as their liberation. This
is particularly true for the Kurds, who are now enjoying the most
sustained period of peace and prosperity since Iraq itself was founded a
century ago. Oil companies are flocking to their oil-rich Kurdistan
autonomous region. Iraq's Shi'ites have also been spared discrimination.

Nor is it obvious that Iraq's neighbours will remain the war's chief beneficiaries, as they seem to be at the moment.

Iran may draw
satisfaction from the fact that today's Iraqi leaders share their
Shi'ite strand of Islam. But in racial and language terms, the Iraqis
are different from the Iranians, and Iraq has no interest in becoming a
permanent Iranian satellite.

Meanwhile, Turkey has
only embraced the neighbouring Kurdish-controlled parts of Iraq in order
to prevent the emergence of a greater Kurdish independent state which
could threaten Turkey's own borders. While the policy is clever and
produced plenty of economic benefits, it also remains tenuous: The
Iranian and Turkish bets in Iraq may turn out to be just as risky as
those the US made a decade ago, albeit less bloody.

Just about the only historic verdict on the war which is likely to endure is that provided by Mr Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations
think-tank in New York, who served as a senior State Department
official at the time the conflict started. The military campaign, he
said this week, "shows the folly of overlooking local realities" and
"trying to remake these societies using large amounts of American
military might".